Driving home from the hospital without a child is not a trek I hope anyone else reading this ever has to take. It is a sad and brutal thing. All you want is to hear the thing you’ve found yourself trying to escape the last few years: a screaming child.
We rested for a day and went to the funeral home on Thursday. There are only a couple of reasons 30-year-olds walk into funeral homes. None of them are good. This one least of all.
We ripped through the minutia. It was surreal. Picking flowers for your baby’s casket. Picking a casket for your baby. My gosh. We chose four white roses representing each member of our family to lay around Kate’s casket for the memorial. We picked a burial plot. That destroyed me.
She would be buried next to Thomas. She shared a delivery room with him. Now she shares a resting place. Jen found great joy in this.
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The memorial was on a Saturday morning. I read a letter I had written about the week. I didn’t think I could get through it. The Lord continued to sustain, though. I looked out over 50 or 75 of our dearest friends and family, and tried my best to preach what we had learned from the week. Here’s part of what I read:
Hebrews 5:8 reminds us that Jesus learned obedience from suffering. We have felt the weight of that verse this week, and testify that it is good. We lost Kate, but we got more of God, and it is a sweet thing.
There is no bitterness among us. How could there be? We aren’t even promised tomorrow. We are sustained here on Earth in the expanse of the universe only by God’s words. We are owed nothing.
We are instead grateful to have met Kate. To have shared half a day with her. For Jen to have shared eight months with her. That is a gift! It is nothing else. And while Jen wanted Kate to meet her and see her face and feel her embrace, we rejoice that she saw Jesus first.
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I’ve always enjoyed the spotlight to a degree. I think everyone does in some way. That feels like a pretty personal thing to admit, but I’m also writing about the loss of a child, so I guess we’re beyond that. This was a week when I both embraced and loathed the spotlight.
I embraced it because I was glad to shine a light on our Lord, and I loathed it because I really, really wish I didn’t need to in this way.
The last of these spotlight moments was carrying my child’s casket from the hearse to the grave. I spoke with our pastor a few hours before that. He stared me in the eyes and told me that, as her father, I wouldn’t regret putting her casket in the ground.
I shook as I stood in the road 25 yards from her resting place and stared at a casket the size of a wastebasket, with 15 sets of eyes staring at the back of my head. I didn’t want to move. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to wake up.Eventually, I lowered my six-pound child six feet in the ground with a pair of straps that looked like they should have been corralling boxes in the bed of our truck when we moved to our next house.
I had to get down on my knees and then lay on my chest to reach far enough in to release the casket. We buried Kate with some of our favorite things. Books, pictures and drawings from the kids. We wept over the grave and laid four roses on her buried casket (even the one Hannah destroyed at the memorial).
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Putting a baby in the ground changes you. I don’t know how it couldn’t. We went back to the church, and I found one of those strong men I mentioned earlier. He held me again and told me things would never be the same for any of us. He’s right.
A 19th-century hymnist named Horatio Spafford knew the feelings we felt that day. Spafford and his wife lost four daughters when their ship crossing the Atlantic, sank. He then wrote what might be the most famous hymn of all time. We sang it at the memorial. The first verse crushes.
When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.
On our way home from the memorial and burial, Jen told me she felt like she’d never worshiped like she did at Kate’s memorial. She’d never had this much on the table.
In our 30-plus years on Earth, we have almost exclusively known great gifts and a rich life. I said this at the memorial, but we have a good life. We have tremendous friends, enjoy our work, and delight in our children.
For a lot of us (myself included), Christianity has come easy. There’s been no suffering. There’s been no pain. There have been few questions. There’s been no reason to not trust God and to not call ourselves Christians.
And now there is.
Now we have known unimaginable depths. The sorrow that flowed that week is an unspeakable thing. And we can truthfully say the Lord is good in both the joy and the sorrow, if not greater in the sorrow. That was what we tried to point to all week.
That we do not hope in our children. That we do not hope in each other. That we do not hope in our friends or our families or in anything outside the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. That is all. In Christ alone. This was a wild reminder of that. One we didn’t want, but always need.
My friend Nathan said that until that week, loving the Lord amid sorrow this deep was only a theory for many of us. Putting a baby in the ground makes it real. And not just for us. Our friends mourned deeply with us, which was as rich a reminder as I’ve ever had of God’s purpose in ordaining a deep community of friends.
Peter would call all of this sanctification:
In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith?—?more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire?—?may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1 Pet. 1:6–8)
If I’m honest with myself, this is a good thing for me. Would I choose this path? Never. Would I choose any part of it for myself or anyone I’ve ever met in my life? No. But it is ultimately good for me and for my family, and that’s a really difficult thing to admit.
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This is why I say we lost a child (a baby!), and gained everything. Christ is everything, or he is nothing. We lost so much, but gained so much more. We got so much more of the Lord than we ever had before. We got more of the Lord than I knew was possible for a human to get.
It’s hard to describe what I mean when I say we got more of God. That is an ambiguous thing, I realize. We all saw it on each other’s faces, though. The Lord was near. We all shared a lot of joy and peace that week that wasn’t man-made. It was sweet. It was a deeply spiritual week. Probably the most spiritual of our lives.
Life that week was so thick and so rich that it barely resembled all the other weeks I’ve experienced. And the goodness in all of this (and a sign of God’s spectacular grace to us) is that the only constant we knew that week is that God is still good and his grace and love roll deeper than we will ever know. He is sufficient, but he is also beyond sufficient. He is good enough to give us more of himself, no matter the circumstance.
James 1:17 says this:
Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
Jen says that means our faith must not waver because God didn’t change. He didn’t waver. The only thing that has changed is how much of him we carry with us. We lost sweet Kate, but we got so much of the Lord. Not in spite of, but because of her.
Don’t mistake what I’m saying here. We lost a lot. We lost a child. It is every parent’s deepest fear and greatest nightmare. I honestly can’t, off the top of my head, think of anything worse in terms of sheer traumatic force applied to two married adults. But we gained even more than we lost. This is a bittersweet reality. One too complex for me to understand in full.
A pastor named Dave Zuleger once observed this about suffering:
“Suffering is one of the great instruments in God’s hands to continue to reveal to us our dependence on him and our hope in him. God is good to give us the greatest gift he can give us, which is more of himself, and he’s good however he chooses to deliver that gift.”
We can now testify to the truth in these words.
We have two healthy kids and one on the way. God is good. We have two healthy kids and the one on the way has died. And God is even greater than we thought he was.
* * * * *
So now we move on. But we move on as vastly different people than we were before. All of us. Not just Jen and me. Our friends, our families, everyone who was involved. We have been grateful for that. Not only that could our burden be divvied up, but that the Lord would mature us and those around us because of this.
My friend Josh sat with us in the delivery room a few hours after Kate was born and confessed amid many tears that he’d never longed for heaven like he had on that day. I thought that was a compelling and honest confession. One I tearfully agreed with and tucked away.
I’ve always found heaven to be a strange thing. Or rather my relationship with heaven. It seems like a place we should long for more than we do given how twisted and disturbing the planet we live on is. And yet, I like it here. I really do. C. S. Lewis would say I prefer mud pies.
That’s not something I’m proud of. It’s also something I’m hopeful will change as I continue to accept the reality that sweet Kate is there (and not here) forever. And it’s already started. Heaven is more at the forefront of my life because of that week. We’ve talked about it more. It’s a place I think about. It’s a place I want to be.
Not to see the girl I lost, although that will be a good thing. But it is a pale and pathetic thing compared to seeing in full the God who willingly chose that which I would never dream of choosing. I want to meet my daughter, yes, but what I really long for is to meet the Father who gave his Son.
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This article originally appeared at The Gospel Coalition, published with permission.
